Everybody has neighbours. They may be inches away behind a party wall in a small row of terraced houses, above you in another high rise council flat, or in the next country mansion three miles away.Neighbours can be other families or single people, office blocks, factories, churchyards, motorway junctions, a cinema or any number of other premises. The thing they all have in common is that they are located next to each other. They are there 365 days a year, 24 hours a day.

 

Neighbours And Security

From your house security survey you already know that different neighbours can have a different impact or influence on your security. We used an example of a semi-detached house that has a 24-hour petrol station as an immediate neighbour. The presence of that neighbour could be a security threat because it gives total strangers an excuse to be in the area near your house at any time of the day and night. Another example we used was of a badly managed public house at the end of a dead end road. Rowdy and drunken customers coming and going to that pub increase the security problems for every house in that road.

Neighbours can be a problem, but you must realise that neighbours can also enhance and improve your security. From old-fashioned community spirit with neighbourly concern for people living close by, to more formalised community watch systems, neighbours have co-operated to improve security in an area. For any of this to work, one thing is absolutely necessary, and that is to be on good terms with the neighbours.

Sociologists have written learned papers to describe the many forms of breakdown in modern society. There seems to be a lack of cohesion that leaves people not knowing the names of neighbours who have lived next to each other for years, or allows old folk to lie dead in their homes undiscovered and unmissed for weeks. Is it a breakdown in social relationships? Does that avoidance of relationships foster communities where you don’t speak to or know the name of half of your neighbours?

Some experts have attributed it all to a modern fast-living world, where people don’t think they have time to stop and speak to the people who live and work around them. Some say that with the increase in mobility people don’t have time to get to know each other before they move on to another job or a new home. Others think that the increase of mindless crime is to blame, because people are basically too scared to get involved or to risk getting to know their neighbours. Whatever the reason is, it is clear that people are not talking to each other.

Local governments are now trying to rebuild links into fractured and disjointed communities. They are spending millions in building what they call ‘community cohesion’ in the hope that it will reduce crime and disorder, and hopefully banish anti-social behaviour.

But I believe that community cohesion will only work if it blooms naturally within the communities themselves, rather than being imposed or grafted on artificially. When people realise that they will benefit from any investment they make in their community they may make the effort, but they will only do that if they can clearly see that there will be a benefit to them!

One benefit is greater security. No matter who your neighbour is you will benefit from making contact with them, but not in a mercenary way. By making friends and expecting nothing, you will build relationships that will reward you in many ways.

Helpful Neighbours

If you live next door to the 24-hour petrol station, at least in some part think of the staff there as 24-hour security guards. They will be as distrustful of you as you are of them, but over time a friendly nod will turn into a greeting. That greeting will become short conversations and before you know it you will be on friendly terms with them.

Before that friendship was built, the garage employees would have ignored a stranger climbing over your side gate, but now they know you they are motivated to at least call the police to report unusual and suspicious behaviour.

At the same time you might telephone the garage kiosk and ask if they knew that there are some lads climbing up on their storeroom roof, giving them the opportunity to check to see if it is just high spirits, or a prelude to stealing their tobacco supply. The same goes for any other neighbours, office employees, shop employees, school teachers and caretakers, or maybe just Mr and Mrs Biggins from number 42.